A must-read, but only after you’ve laughed yourself into a cardiac arrest with the first two

I WAS horrified when I read the title of Kiran Nagarkar’s third book in his Ravan & Eddie series: Rest in Peace. Rest in Peace? What did Nagarkar mean?

I didn’t want Ravan and Eddie to rest in peace. I didn’t want them out of my life for even a second. If Nagarkar did bump them off, I swore, I would hold a candlelight procession of one outside his house, clutching a placard that read “Kiran Nagarkar Unfair to Ravan & Eddie & Me”.

Or okay, I thought. If they have to die, their ghosts must haunt CWD Chawl No 17, Mumbai. That’s where Ravan and Eddie were born and that’s from where they created their own brand of mayhem, tumbling us through the magic and muck of the city, reminding us, over and over again, of what an unbelievable place Mumbai can be.

Rest in Peace, like the first two Ravan and Eddie books, is pure Mumbai, combining Bollywood, gangsters, nonstop rain, enterprise, love, magic, muck, madness, traffic, firstday first-shows, Marine Drive, music — and even a fire at the iconic Taj Mahal Hotel, in which our two unlikely heroes become unlikely heroes.The story is not a straight narrative. Though it’s chronologically told, the book is more a series of episodes set off either by Ravan or Eddie themselves, or by circumstances (or gangsters) that suck our leading men in, chew them up and spit them out, leaving them battered for a bit, but soon ready to take on the world again.

But basically, the book begins in a surprising way. Ravan and Eddie are hits. Yes, really. The music they had inadvertently composed for a film has the whole of India and all of Bollywood in an uproar. Producers, music directors and superstar actors are all bumping into each other on the malodorous, paan-stained staircases of CWD Chawl No 17, falling over themselves to sign the duo for their films. (For readers ill-fated enough not to be Mumbaikars, a chawl is a tenement, just one social step higher than a slum.)

Among the many (unread but signed) contracts not worth the paper they had been typed on, is an offer from a producer who does not promise the duo the universe, but hopes that with their music and their friend Asmaan’s lyrics, his final movie will be a hit. Perhaps. The women in R&E’s lives push them to take on this producer’s movie, and soon R&E are so successful they can actually afford three-bedroom flats in Pali Hill. The world belongs to them: these goodfor- nothings who turned out to be good at a lot of stuff.

Naturally it isn’t all smooth. We are talking about Ravan and Eddie, after all. And Bollywood and gangsters are involved, all in Mumbai and suddenly in Chambal too. Rest in Peace is completely mad, and utterly fall-off-your-chair-laughing hilarious as only Kiran Nagarkar can make it.

But truthfully, you wouldn’t understand this book unless you had read and adored the first two books in the series: Ravan & Eddie and The Extras. That’s because Nagarkar makes only feeble efforts to bring the duo’s history into the narrative. He’d rather take you on an energetic gallop through the minds and worlds of his heroes as they are at present, which means if you don’t already know how the two of them were born, grew up and became best friends and partners, Rest in Peace will be a mystery to you. So buy this book. But don’t read it till you’ve laughed yourself into a cardiac arrest with the first two.